How often do you laugh?

For me the answer is not enough.
I get too busy and too worried...as though I truly am spinning the world.

So I'd like to give a shout out to our new friend Molly, who recently visited our craftspeople in Congo and took some beautiful pictures. She is a talented photographer who likes to travel and offer her skills (for free!) to small organizations like us. She took amazing pictures, and they will appear on our website soon. But in the meantime, I have them here sitting on my computer making me smile.

All I have to do is peek at the pictures, and I can hear the laughter. And it makes me feel small, in the best sense of the word.

People in Congo know how to laugh...I mean belly laugh. They know how to kick back and enjoy a moment. That is not to say that the problems in Congo aren't huge and the suffering isn't very real. But why is it that a culture's ability to laugh often seems to be directly proportional to the number of difficulties it faces? Perhaps that sounds irreverent. But I have a sneaking suspicion that in the midst of it all, the ability to laugh counts for more than one might think.

So in case you didn't have a very laugh-inspiring day today, I'm offering a sneak peek at a few of pictures that make me smile.

And you know what? I spent my first month of learning Swahili trying to find a word for the verb "to smile". People kept telling me "kucheka", but actually Kucheka means to laugh. I began to get very worried about a language that didn't have a word for to smile. But it turns out that kucheka means both...to smile and to laugh, as though they are one and the same. And perhaps they are. I may not have learned the belly laugh yet, but I choose to begin with a smile.